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It’s impossible to count the number of people Leslie Petter impacted in her 47 years, especially during her time at Western and as a teacher, coach and athletic director at Medway high school.

Friday night, that total, whatever it is, increases by at least one when Jen Vaughan receives the inaugural Leslie Petter Scholarship. She’ll receive it at Medway, where the Mustangs will play Mt. Royal in an exhibition women’s basketball game on Leslie Petter Night.

Petter died in May 2011 of breast cancer, having beaten an acute form of leukemia years earlier.

“Oh, wow. That’s so nice,” Vaughan, a fourth-year guard from Dundas, said when told of the award Tuesday. “I definitely feel extremely honoured. It’s one thing to win all-star awards in basketball, but to win something like this . . . obviously, this lady left a huge impact on a lot of people, so I feel extremely humbled to represent someone like that.

“At Western, we have so many opportunities to create our own marks, so it’s nice to have something like this we can call our own,” added the kinesiology student and Hamilton St. Mary’s grad. “I feel like a part of history.”

Mustangs head coach Brian Cheng said the scholarship fund is close to the $25,000 needed to become self-sustaining. Once that is reached, he said, an annual $4,000 scholarship, the most permitted by Ontario university regulations for athletic awards, will go to the Mustang women’s player who best exemplifies Petter’s qualities —leadership, commitment to team and citizenship.

“When I took over the program last year, I found out about Leslie and what an important player she was, not only to our program, but to Medway and the whole London community,” Cheng said. “She had a tremendous impact on the community as a whole. She was such a giving person and it spoke volumes that she was still working with an organ-donor program the week she passed.

“Jen exudes some of those same qualities, but in a different way. She leads by example, she’s a little more quiet — I hear Leslie was a bit more vocal — and the care she has for her team is synonymous to what Leslie had, and in Leslie’s case her team was all the people she had round her.”

The night will become an annual event, one of three initiatives to help fund the scholarship, Cheng said. The others are donations made at the TVRA conference finals and all-star nights in Strathroy, and private donations. Admission to Friday’s game is through a donation.

Mt. Royal, based in Calgary, has moved up from the community college level, where it was a perennial power, to the university ranks this season.

“I’m excited to have the opportunity to get one of the newest CIS schools to come to London,” said Cheng, who knew Mt. Royal coach Joe Enevoldson from his time coaching at UVic for 11 years before coming to Western.

The Mustangs are 3-2 in preseason games and play Cheng’s former squad Sunday at 11 a.m. at Alumni Hall. They play Waterloo and Brock in their last two preseason games next weekend before opening the season at home Nov. 9 against Ottawa.

“I’m really excited about the season,” Vaughan said. “I just think we’re going to be able to compete at the top level and we should have high expectations.”